Do roguelike games train you not to rage in League? [very long]

So, I've always had a bit of trouble empathizing with people who get upset when their teammates feed or afk. Time after time I see the same claims: "you'd snap at your adc too if they kept getting grabbed", "if your team ignored your pings and walked into a trap, admit it you'd scream at them", "if you've never even once raged at your team for losing every lane, you're either lying or you're not human." And those things really don't apply to me. Under even the most frustrating circumstances, even if it's an important ranked game, I find myself feeling a vague sense of disappointment when things are going bad for the team, but never anything approaching actual anger even if I can clearly see that one individual is the cause.

The other night I was playing a game of Desktop Dungeons and I realized that that feeling isn't at all specific to LoL. I am a fan of roguelikes—games featuring randomly-generated hazards, permadeath, and difficult decisions that require deep knowledge of the game. That definition isn't perfect, but it'll do. I'm thinking of both modern somewhat actiony games like FTL and Spelunky and Binding of Isaac but also classic turn-based ones like NetHack and the original Rogue. These games can be brutal, and luck is an important factor but in a more substantial way than "an enemy got a lucky crit, you die." Multiple different types of overlapping challenges—keep your health up, acquire necessary powerups, establish safe areas you can retreat to, avoid fights that are too risky or impossible—mean that a stroke of bad luck can raise the difficulty of your run in a way that has lasting ramifications and affects the other types of challenge. Taking damage early might mean that you have to pass up the chance at some good equipment. Failing to get powered up may require you to risk fighting in a dangerous area to catch up. Running low on a vital resource may put you into desperation mode, trying anything that might keep you in the game.

The theme in these games is that pure bad luck might suddenly or gradually increase the difficulty without you necessarily doing anything wrong, though of course it could always become more difficult because you are doing things wrong. And also, at some point (especially classic turn-based roguelikes) the game will become unwinnable. You'll reach a point where a combination of your decisions and your luck will put you in a situation where you are going to die no matter what. Usually it's not obviously "checkmate" until a few turns before your death, but sometimes your fate is sealed well in advance. If you run low on food and by pure misfortune there happens to be no sources of (unpoisoned) food that you can reach in the next 300 turns, you're already dead and you just don't know it yet. In fact, depending on the nature of the game, it is quite possible that you rolled up a randomly unwinnable run where even a perfect and omniscient AI could not find a set of moves that will result in a win. More often, your own choices will doom you simply because you couldn't possibly foresee the random events that are coming up, e.g. you spend 300 gold on a magic ring, and 2 hours later you starve to death because food was so scarce and you're 15 gold short of buying a ration.

Coming back around to League (finally), there's a lot in common with roguelike themes. Things that are out of your control may wildly influence the difficulty, perhaps even make the game impossible to win from the start, and yet your personal skill has an enormous factor in determining the outcome of the game because your own actions at every turn have the potential to ripple through the game with consequences you couldn't have reasonably foreseen.

But because of the complexity of the game, it's typically not clear that the game has reached an unwinnable state until the nexus is actually getting hit. And in every loss, it'd be irresponsible to say that there was literally no series of actions you or anyone else could have taken to make it a win.

Some "hardcore" gamers complain about this generation's games and claim that they are too easy, that they don't punish you enough, that they hold your hand and make you soft. Not like the old NES era games that were relentlessly unforgiving. I don't necessarily think that's the right way of looking at it. I don't think that permadeath games with RNG and no saving are necessarily more difficult. It's just that they test you in a different way. These roguelike games are different from more mainstream games because they are not a puzzle that certainly has a solution. There is no guarantee that you will win, even if you do what you're supposed to do.

If you don't play these types of games, this may legitimately be a foreign concept. If you load up Arkham Origins or Watch Dogs or something, you're presented with a set of challenges that can be overcome. Period. There's a minimum of one correct way to overcome them. And (this is the important part) it's understood that the player knows that the challenges can be overcome if you do things correctly, the way the game has been teaching you to do them. You're never going to reach a level where they haven't tested to ensure that it is 100% possible for the player to get through and reach the next area.

I won't label it as a good or bad thing, but I'm sure that this concept of guaranteed results is what draws a lot of people into gaming. Most video games offer you a reward as an observably direct consequence of your efforts. We don't get that assurance from real life. If you study for the test all weekend, it doesn't guarantee that you will get an A. If you say the right things to the girl, it doesn't guarantee that she will fall in love with you. If you teach your child right from wrong, it doesn't guarantee that they will grow up to be a good person. Compare that to Guitar Hero, where if you hold the yellow button and strum the thing at the right time, you are guaranteed to get 1000 points and continue your combo. You can try and still fail, but there is a right way and that right way guarantees a good result.

For someone who is accustomed to these conventional games, a roguelike game throws you a pretty big twist. You'll be rewarded with a great item randomly if you're lucky, and you'll run into a tremendously difficult fight that you don't have the resources to win if you're unlucky. And that fight isn't there because it teaches you an important lesson or because it is a specific punishment against players who squandered their resources. It's just arbitrarily there, because you are playing a game with arbitrary combinations of hazards that isn't designed to always be fair or even possible.

You master these games by learning the best way to persevere no matter what the RNG throws at you, even though there's no guarantee that that means you'll certainly win. In fact, the way that you handle the unfairly difficult runs shows a lot more about how well you know the game than the runs where you find a great item 3 minutes in. And learning to embrace the difficult runs is key to becoming a more skilled player, because these are the times where your skill will actually matter.

I approach League in the same way. While I know that my teammates are human beings, I think of them as random number generators (in the sense that I can't really predict or control what they're going to do). If the support won't ward, or if the jungler dies to golems, or if mid has a bad build, those are just random factors making this game a little harder than it might have been otherwise.

And just like a roguelike, I'm not going to throw my hands up and cry about an "unwinnable" game just because I did well and still lost. There is the possibility that the game was unwinnable—that a perfect AI would've lost if it had taken my place at the start. But it is unlikely. And more importantly, it's beside the point. The point is to be given challenges and try to overcome them. If you do well, you will win more often than if you didn't do well. And yet doing well doesn't mean you win; it is not a puzzle with a correct solution that you were supposed to do.

Is it possible that my attitude towards League was shaped by these types of games? And is it possible that other players become so frustrated with their team because their attitude was shaped by games with more deliberately-tuned challenges? Once again, I don't mean to diss games with conventional challenges. These games are fun too, and can be extremely challenging. But I wonder whether growing up playing only those types of games leads to a mindset where you inherently expect to win as long as you're doing things right. Perhaps the root cause of a lot of rage is the expectation that, like other video games, there will definitely be a guaranteed reward as an observably direct consequence of your efforts. What do you guys think?